Laura S. Tuominen, Heikki Helanterä, Patrik Karell
et al.
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that maintaining and increasing individual and community resilience is essential, particularly in cities. Access to urban green spaces such as parks and gardens supports resilience and well-being. Here, we studied how the pandemic influenced the attitudes towards and outcomes of urban box gardening in the city of Turku in Finland. We analyzed this small-scale social-ecological system before and during the pandemic in 2019, 2020, and 2021. We find that box gardening’s importance increased for many gardeners due to the pandemic, supporting that box gardening can enhance resilience. We find that gardeners remain motivated to cultivate but contrary to expectations, they report receiving fewer benefits, suggesting the pandemic’s negative influence on well-being extends to urban gardening. Our findings highlight the manifold and long-term influence of disturbances. The long-term changes in attitudes and outcomes suggest that the pandemic’s influence on urban gardening might be even transformative.
Martina Fuchs, Johannes Westermeyer, Lena Finken
et al.
Dual vocational education and training systematically combines the learning of apprentices (in vocational schools) or students (in applied universities) with the ‘learning venue’ of the company. The dual vocational education and training exists in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and stands for regional competitiveness as well as for job opportunities of young people on the local labour market. Outside of these three countries, the dual system hardly exists, but dual practices are subject of international skill transfer policies. While this transfer is well researched, it is hardly known to what extent (in mirror image) subsidiaries of foreign companies take part in the dual system of German speaking countries. This question was examined, by focussing on subsidiaries of multinational companies in Germany. Theoretically, the contribution relates to research on local knowledge bases and the embeddedness of foreign subsidiaires. The study pursues a qualitative method. The results show that the local training managers have freedom for decision-making and use this in favour of getting involved in dual vocational education and training. However, the effort turns out to be high. Dual activities take place primarily as a strategy for adapting to the institutional environment, not as a way of shaping the environment. The local stakeholders are mostly reactive in this regard. This points to possible future fields of research on local knowledge bases and local embeddedness and, with regard to practice, to the relevance of mutual coordination.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
<p>This article seeks to introduce, describe and interpret the processes of territorial transformation that have manifested in recent years in <em>Corrientes</em>, <em>Argentina</em>. The policies and practices tested possess a neoliberal rationality in which different agents are involved that lead to the privatization of ecosystems such as wetlands, the production of spaces and real estate products of exclusive social segment, the unlocking of public land for real estate businesses, the expulsion of those who occupy informally to build their habitat, among others consequences. The cartographies of inequality, far from having a recent root, are linked to historical transformations that will be contemplated in the work to think about the future of current territorial policies. It is part of an exploratory research that seeks to describe how neoliberal urban policies contribute to the production of greater inequalities, the accumulation of wealth and the socialization of environmental costs.</p>
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Industrial practice is vital to achieving economic growth and prosperity in both developed and developing countries - of which Egypt is one. However, it harms the environment by high rates of consumption, depletion of natural resources and disposal of waste. Therefore, transformation of the conventional industrial system to be compatible with the ecosystem and its capabilities to renew itself is necessary. This approach requires minimization of waste, extraction of raw materials and use of nonrenewable resources. This can be accomplished through Industrial Ecology (IE) and Industrial Symbiosis (IS), which maximize utilization of resources in the production process by using waste as a valuable “by-product” rather than disposing it in landfills. Hence, based on normative and experimental literature in IE, IS and previous eco-industrial parks (EIP) experiences, this research attempts to provide an intellectual framework for the planning process for the transformation of conventional industrial zones (CIZs) into EIPs. It is composed of five stages: selection of industrial zones, local context analysis, planning eco-industrial park (EIP), community participation & raising awareness and organizational structure. we hope that this research will represent a reference starting point in the field of industrial ecology planning for urban planners, practitioners and academics and to be a contribution to the scientific debate related to transforming CIZs to EIPs.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Due to high level of urbanization and economic growth rate of GCC countries the issues of smart cities development are becoming increasingly important for this region. The goal of this paper is to set a number of economic components that can influence the design, implementation and use of smart cities initiatives in GCC. The authors analyse the current strategies of smart cities in 6 countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE). As part of economic dimension authors analyse public expenditure on R&D, on education, national income, GDP growth rate in order to figure out challenges and prospects of developing smart cities in GCC
In recent years, enormous amounts of digital data have been generated. In parallel, data collection, storage, and analysis technologies have developed. Recently, there has been an increasing trend of people moving towards urban areas. By 2030 more than 60% of the world's population will live in an urban environment. Urban areas are big data resource because they include millions of citizens, technological devices, and vehicles which generate data continuously. Besides, rapid urbanization brings many challenges, such as environmental pollution, traffic congestion, health problems, energy management, etc. Some policies for countries are required to cope with urbanization problems. One of these policies is to build smart cities. Smart cities integrate information and communication technology and various physical devices connected to the network (the internet of things or IoT) to both improve the quality of government services and citizen welfare. This chapter presents a literature review of big data, smart cities, IoT, green-IoT concepts, using technology and methods, and applications worldwide.
BackgroundCycling for transportation has the potential to contribute to an increase in people’s physical activity levels. A growing body of evidence links the natural and the built environment to cycling. Whereas previous studies were mostly done within one city or one region, the present study covers the whole of the Netherlands, allowing an investigation of whether associations between environmental characteristics and cycling are context-specific. The study examines the extent to which objectively measured natural and built environment characteristics contribute to cycling duration in the Netherlands, as well as the differential effect of environmental characteristics on cycling duration by municipality size.MethodsOur sample from the Dutch National Travel Survey 2010–2014 comprised 110,027 people aged 20–89 years, residing in 3163 four-digit postal code areas, nested within 387 municipalities across the whole of the Netherlands. Multilevel Tobit regression models were fitted to assess the associations between the natural and the built environment with average daily cycling duration (in minutes), while adjusting for individual and household characteristics. Interaction effects of natural and built environment characteristics and municipality size on cycling duration were also investigated.ResultsHigher address density, more bus stops, and shorter distance from home to the nearest train station were positively related to cycling duration. Respondents were more likely to cycle on days with higher temperatures, less wind, and less precipitation. Interaction tests showed that increased street density and address density were less cycling-promotive in small urban areas compared to medium or large cities. On the other hand, the positive association between number of bus stops and cycling duration was weaker in the largest and medium-sized cities compared to small urban and rural areas.ConclusionsInteractions suggest that relations between environmental characteristics and cycling duration are context-specific (i.e., dependent on circumstances that differ between highly urbanized and less urbanized areas). Our findings need to be replicated in other countries to gain more insight into the interplay between environmental factors and municipality size.
Most of the planet's population currently lives in urban areas, and urban land expansion is one of the most dramatic forms of land conversion. Understanding how cities evolve temporally, spatially, and organizationally in a rapidly urbanizing world is critical for sustainable development. However, few studies have examined the coevolution of urban attributes in time and space simultaneously and the adequacy of power law scaling across cities and through time, particularly in countries that have experienced abrupt, widespread, political and economic changes. Here, we show the temporal coevolution of multiple physical, demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental attributes in individual cities, and the cross-city scaling of urban attributes at six time points (i.e., 1978, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010) in 32 major Chinese cities. We found that power law scaling could adequately characterize both the cross-city scaling of urban attributes across cities and the longitudinal scaling describing the temporal coevolution of urban attributes within individual cities. The cross-city scaling properties demonstrated substantial changes over time signifying evolved social and economic forces. A key finding was that the cross-city linear or superlinear scaling of urban area with population contradicts the theoretical sublinear power law scaling proposed between infrastructure and population. Furthermore, the cross-city scaling between area and population transitioned from linear to superlinear over time, and the superlinear scaling in recent times suggests decreased infrastructure efficiency. Our results demonstrate a diseconomy of scale in urban areal expansion that indicates a significant waste of land resources in the urbanization process. Future planning efforts should focus on policies that increase urban land use efficiency before continuing expansion.
The shift towards capacity building and deteriorating governance, may lead to poor service delivery which is a prime challenge for governing agencies. Different countries follow their own sets of governance parameters and often assess the outcome of policies based on them. In order to compose a uniform good governance framework, we have conducted a comparative analysis among 22 existing governance frameworks across the globe and shortlisted 13 major criteria along with 74 sub-criteria. We explored the method to measure these governance components with the help of various indicators and took expert opinion to distribute weight among these indicators. Finally, the case of Mumbai city is discussed with the examples of direct indicators, which may be used to measure a sub-criteria of any specific criteria. The quantification process is also demonstrated with three specific representative indicators. For example- the contribution towards good-governance has been increased from 0.001218 in 2016 to 0.004466 in 2017, for the indicator “conviction percentage of corruption cases” of sub-criterion “active anti-corruption commission” of criterion “accountability”. Researchers as well as policymakers will be benefitted with the method demonstrated here, which can help in assessing governance of any public service towards further policy amendments. Keywords: Governance, Public, Urban Services, Management, Indicator
Urbanization. City and country, Political institutions and public administration (General)
The poor state of solid waste management in cities of developing countries is fast assuming the scale of a major social/environmental challenge. The main drivers of the waste problem in Nigeria, for instance, are poverty, high population and urbanization growth rates, compounded by a weak and underfunded infrastructure. The gravity of this problem is perhaps best reflected in the level of attention given to it in the United Nations Millennium Declaration in September, 2000. Three of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the Declaration have waste or resource efficiency implications. In response to the waste challenge many developed countries have embarked upon ambitious environmental reforms, recording remarkable advances in best practises and sustainable management of their Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). The same cannot be said for most countries in Sub-Sahara Africa, however, as a result of several barriers militating against sustainable MSW management. Adopting a questionnaire interview methodology, this study surveyed 1557 respondents' drawn from households, business and waste policy-makers in Abuja, Nigeria. Data analysis was carried out using the Statistical Programme for Social Sciences, (SPSS). Multivariate statistical analysis was used to carry out a between subjects multiple comparison of respondents views on the barriers as well as success factors affecting MSW management in the case study area. Findings point towards the need for a sustained public education programme on waste prevention and reuse as the panacea to waste problems in Nigeria. Based on the findings, a case is made for the adaptation of globally successful waste management best practises and strategies to suit local conditions.
Our world is increasingly urbanizing which is highlighting that sustainable cities are essential for maintaining human well-being. This research is one of the first attempts to globally synthesize the effects of urbanization on ecosystem services and how these relate to governance, social development and climate. Three urban vegetation ecosystem services (carbon storage, recreation potential and habitat potential) were quantified for a selection of a hundred cities. Estimates of ecosystem services were obtained from the analysis of satellite imagery and the use of well-known carbon and structural habitat models. We found relationships between ecosystem services, social development, climate and governance, however these varied according to the service studied. Recreation potential was positively related to democracy and negatively related to population. Carbon storage was weakly related to temperature and democracy, while habitat potential was negatively related to democracy. We found that cities under 1 million inhabitants tended to have higher levels of recreation potential than larger cities and that democratic countries have higher recreation potential, especially if located in a continental climate. Carbon storage was higher in full democracies, especially in a continental climate, while habitat potential tended to be higher in authoritarian and hybrid regimes. Similar to other regional or city studies we found that the combination of environment conditions, socioeconomics, demographics and politics determines the provision of ecosystem services. Results from this study showed the existence of environmental injustice in the developing world.